


Wrong Direction

by prepare4trouble



Series: Little By Little [42]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blindness, Ezra needs a hug, Gen, Pre-AU, Visually Impaired Ezra Bridger, blindfold, set during season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 03:25:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13695861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: Set in the past of the AU, before the rest of the crew knew, and before Kanan was blinded.  In an effort to convince himself that he doesn'tneedto be able to see, Ezra tries wearing a blindfold to walk about.  It doesn't go as well as he was hoping.





	Wrong Direction

**Author's Note:**

> This one isn’t the next in the series, it’s set in the past, sometime during season 2. This is not long after Ezra found out what was wrong with his eyes, but well before anybody else knew anything.

Sitting on the edge of Zeb’s bunk with a strip of fabric held in both hands, Ezra took a deep, calming breath.  He held it for a count of three, then exhaled slowly, concentrating on releasing his tension and anxiety; not necessarily into the Force, as Kanan had taught him to do – as long as it was gone, he didn’t care where.

Only, it wasn’t gone.  He could feel his own heartbeat thumping in his chest and his throat, too fast, too hard.  He could feel the dampness of his palms transferring to the piece of cloth in his hands as he ran it nervously through his fingers.

He glanced up, and around the room, giving himself one final chance to commit the layout to memory.  It wasn’t cheating; he was going to have time to do that with the places that he knew, the syndrome stealing his sight would allow him that much at least.

That done,  he slowly lifted the blindfold and placed it carefully over his eyes.  He tied the two ends at the back, tight, but not tight enough to hurt; just enough pressure to hold his eyes firmly closed.  He adjusted the front of the fabric on the bridge of his nose for comfort, then turned his head from left to right, testing out how effective it was.

The answer was very.  Even with the light in his quarters on its brightest setting, the thickness of the cloth covering his eyes effectively blocked out most of it, leaving him unable to see anything but the smallest glow.  It probably wasn’t just the cloth, actually; low light levels were already causing him problems, maybe if his eyes were healthy, he would have been able to see more light.

Of course, if his eyes were healthy, he would have no reason to do this, and he would be spending the afternoon practising his Jedi skills, or pestering Sabine to show him whatever artwork she was working on, or whatever it was that he used to do before he had started to spend every waking hour worrying about the future.

He was going to have to try to stop that somehow; suppress it, push it to one side and learn to ignore it.  If he didn’t, somebody was going to notice something was wrong.  He was going to have to tell them sooner or later, he was going to have no choice, but… not yet.  He wasn’t ready for that yet.

He took another deep breath and tried to release his tension.  Nothing was wrong, everything was fine.  He could do this.  Easy peasy.

He stayed where he was for now.  All he needed to do was get up and walk around the room a little, just to prove to himself that he could do it.  And he  _could_  do it, he knew that.  He was a Jedi; he had shot and destroyed an Imperial Walker in a dust storm with no way of seeing where he was aiming, he could dodge and deflect objects coming at him, without sight.  It wasn’t his favourite exercise, but he could do it.  In fact, in some ways, it was easier to do it without sight than with, and he took hope from that.  If those things were possible, there had to be other ways to use the Force to compensate for sight.

There  _had_  to be.

But for now, he would settle for convincing himself that he could walk around an area he knew, Force or no.  His great aunt had been able to do that with no problems; she hadn’t even needed to use her cane when she was home, and she hadn’t used the Force.  

Not as far as he knew, anyway…

He got to his feet.  All he was going to do for now, was walk to the other side of the room, turn around, and come back again.  When he could do that, he was going to do it again, faster, more confidently.  When he could to  _that_ … he didn’t know, but he was going to think of something.  He was going to keep pushing himself until he really believed it was possible.  Then, knowing that he could still be useful, maybe –  _maybe_  – he would be able to bring himself to tell Kanan and the others.

He had lived in this room for almost two years; he knew its layout by heart, and he could see it in his mind just as easily as if he were looking at it.  This shouldn’t be a problem.

He couldn’t work out why his hands were shaking.

He placed one hand on his own bunk, then took a slow, hesitant step in the direction of the wall.  His other hand hovered just ahead of him, waiting to locate the edge of the room.  Once his fingers touched the wall, he transferred his hand from the bunk to there.

It occurred to him, suddenly and for no reason that he could think of, that he hadn’t locked the door.  He had been supposed to lock it before he started; if someone walked in, he was going to have a hard time explaining what he was doing.  Well, no.  Explaining what he was doing would be easy, they would be able to see it for themselves; explaining  _why_  he was doing it would be more difficult.

Eventually though, he was going to have to do just that.  If he really did have Sacul Syndrome – and he had really,  _really_  tried to find an alternative explanation – behaving in a way that might make the rest of the crew wonder what was wrong was going to be the least of his problems. Sooner or later, he was going to start making mistakes; the kind of mistakes that would give away exactly what was going on without them even needing to ask.

The door was a problem.  If he took the blindfold off now, he might lose his nerve and not be able to bring himself to put it back on again.  Luckily, he knew Zeb wouldn’t be back for several hours, and nobody else was likely to come in without at least knocking or ringing the bell.  He still needed to lock the door just in case, but if he didn’t want to take off the blindfold, there was no reason he couldn’t cross the room and lock the door with it on.  It was literally a case of finding and pressing a button, surely he could do that.

He hoped.

He took a step in the right direction.  He allowed his hand to trace the wall, feeling the cold, smooth texture of the metal under his fingertips.

After a few steps, he turned in the direction of the door.  It would have been easier to stick to the wall and follow the edge of the room, but it felt like cheating.  He put the back of his shoulder to the wall, and facing in what he was reasonably sure was the right direction, he took a step.  Instinctively, he felt both of his arms raise to stomach height, reaching out ahead of him for obstacles that he knew weren’t there.  Another step.

His steps were far shorter than his usual stride.  He could feel that easily without looking.  Ordinarily, he could cross the room in maybe five steps.  Like this, he had no idea how many it would take.  He swept his hands through the air ahead of him, then took another step, deliberately longer this time.

He knew where everything was.  He was in his own quarters.  There was no reason to be afraid, but he could still feel his heart beating too quickly, his breathing too heavy.  The blindfold was suddenly too tight, crushing him, growing tighter by the second.  He ignored it.  Another step.  He should be almost there by now.  He reached out for the door, his hands passed through air.  Another step.  Still nothing.

Confusion began to worry at the edges of his certainty.  His steps hadn’t been that short.  Or had they? He tried again, still no door.  Agai…

Pain exploded suddenly down his shin, made all the worse for the fact that it was completely unexpected.  There was nothing there, nothing that he could have hit.  His way across the room had been – should have been – clear.  He sunk to the floor, fingers massaging his shin until the pain began to subside.

He pulled off the blindfold then, and blinked in the brightness of the room, waiting for his focus to return.  He wasn’t where he had thought he was.  Somehow, he had ended up hitting an open drawer of a storage unit, much too far to the right of where he should have been.

He turned and looked back at his starting point.  The only explanation was that he had set off at the wrong angle.  He had been walking in the wrong direction.  Somehow, he had ended up traveling in a diagonal across the room, heading to the furthest corner, lengthening the journey, and putting an obstacle in his path right at the end.

His leg stung fiercely.  He pulled up the fabric of his pants to survey the damage, but there was nothing to see.  Gingerly, he ran his fingers up the leg, and winced as he touched the injury.  It was going to bruise for sure.

He reached out with his uninjured leg and kicked the drawer closed, hard.  The bang reverberated around the room, so loud that he was sure somebody would hear it.  He didn’t care if they did.  He kicked it again for good measure, putting all of his anger into the action, forcing it out through his heel as he slammed it into the front of the storage unit.

Unbidden, unexpected, tears began to prickle the corners of his eyes.  His fingers tightened angrily around the piece of cloth still clenched in them.  He screwed it into a tight ball and threw it away hard across the room.  It unraveled as it flew, and floated gently to the ground.

One day, one day soon, the blindfold would be a permanent fixture; he would never, ever be able to take it off.  Instead he would find himself cast adrift in a sea of darkness, stumbling, struggling to do even the simplest of tasks.  He couldn’t even walk across the kriffing room without hurting himself! He couldn’t do this.  He couldn’t do it.  He couldn’t…

The blurring at the corners of his eyes, partially the eye condition, partially the tears, started to feel like the walls closing in around him, and a claustrophobic panic rose from somewhere deep within him.

He couldn’t do this.  He didn’t know how, and there was nobody that could even begin to teach him.  He couldn’t do it, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.

He couldn’t breathe.

He forced in a deep breath, and another, and another.  The room around him was spinning, swirling out of his control.   _Everything_  was out of his control.

He sat there on the ground, hands cradling his injured leg as sobs wracked his body, his head beginning to throb lightly, not because of his eyes this time, at least not directly.

When he could bring himself to move again, he dragged himself into bed, pulled a cover over his fully clothed body, boots and all, and closed his eyes.

When Zeb found him an hour later, he was asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are loved.


End file.
